The John James Newsletter. <123>

The John James Newsletter 123

18 June 2016

Men become civilised, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt

H L Mencken

Corporations try to prevent the public from making decisions over their own fate, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run are not in the hands of the public, but in those of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public

Noam Chomsky

Read this on Trade Treaties, negotiated in secret, designed to end

Protection for the environment

Protection for our health and wellbeing

Protection of working conditions and wages

Protection of the culture of our country

Protection of an independent internet

Protection for democracy and the will of the people

I have published many references to TTIP and other “Free” Trade Treaties. They are the means by which the largest companies will have the power to turn us into consumer-serfs.

Money’s Reach

The trade secrets directive, approved by the European Council last month, treats any information that a corporation hopes to keep out of the public domain as “commercial property”. Whistleblowers and campaigners trying to expose corporate malfeasance could be subject to massive fines.

NATO is continuing its military buildup and “exercises” on Russia’s borders, Moscow is taking “counter-measures,” while the US mainstream media remains silent. The NATO build up is not episodic but intended to grow and be permanent, and be ratified at the NATO summit in Warsaw in July. No such hostile forces have amassed on Russia’s Western frontiers—now from the Baltic to the Black Sea—since the Nazi German invasion in 1941.

The military establishment does indeed have a highly successful strategy: to protect and enhance its own prosperity. Creating and maintaining an effective fighting force becomes secondary, reflecting a relative disinterest in the actual business of war, as opposed to the business of raking in dollars for the Pentagon and its industrial and political partners.

Rapid Polar Warming causes a dramatic transition in which El Nino has lost the power to influence climate and become a slave to a heat-sucking engine at the pole. It heralds death to winter. The extra heat in the system that scientists are now pretty concerned about appears to be coming from a ramping Northern Hemisphere polar amplification.

Battle royale brews over battery storage and control of energy markets

Large energy users, battery storage developers and some small energy retailers are pushing for a change in energy market rules that could have dramatic consequences for the industry – levelling the playing field for battery storage

First, they branded it the Bob Brown green bank or slush fund, and then they spent nearly three years trying to abolish it. But now the Coalition government has found a new use for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation – a ready source of funds for some good old election pork-barrelling.

It seems that Washington is clearly setting the Saudis up to take the fall should the 9/11 cover-up start to unravel. The Saudis can already see the guns being pointed at its direction. This has the potential to bring an end to the strategic alliance between Washington and Saudi Arabia.

With the departure of a Spanish oil company from the Chukchi Sea, only Shell still holds a drilling lease in U.S. Arctic waters. Here’s why an Arctic oil boom never happened and why it probably never will.

Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines destroyed more than half the world’s production of coconut oil which is one of the two most commonly used vegetable fats in food production worldwide. The 2011 flood in Queensland stopped production in the fourth biggest coal exploration site on Earth for weeks, with economic repercussions well beyond Australia. The effects of small daily perturbations due to extreme temperatures leading to heat-stress among workers in construction, agriculture and other economic sectors.

Chicago group Voices for Creative Nonviolence held a 150-mile walk against indefinite detention, solitary confinement, and the racist US prison system. For two weeks, a group of 20 walked across the state of Illinois from east to west.

The Moscow-Kazan High Speed Railway’s total length will stand at around 770 kilometers. Trains may go at a speed of 350-400 kilometers per hour, and the time en route between the two cities could be 3-3.5 hours against the current 14 hours.